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Monthly Archives: November 2014

“There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there’s the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is “Does it work, and how does it work?” How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading’s intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like plugging in to an electric…

[This essay is a shortened version taken from a book project I’m working on called The Predator Empire]

A History of Militarized U.S. Policing

American policing was shaped by colonial contact with the British. Without evidence of criminal activity, British soldiers in New England searched through homes under a general warrant known as a “writ of assistance.” And under the Quartering Act of 1765 and 1774, colonists were required to house and feed British soldiers. This came despite Britain’s own aversion to the “quartering” of soldiers in its towns and cities—a practice banned under the English Bill of Rights in 1689. As Radley Balko explains in his book Rise of the Warrior Cop, “Bostonians were British subjects, but they were being treated like enemies of the state” (p.14). And so, the early founders were profoundly aware of the toxicity of militarism. The aversion to quartering and general warrants was…

You can’t go there. Nobody can. But information can be exchanged, so money can be made there.”

– William Gibson, The Peripheral

What if the future were run by gangsters? Not your old Italian or Russian Mafioso’s, but families who live beyond their years who control secrets and knowledge bases larger than governments. Who can roam through time or at least send bits of data back to do their bidding. To murder, perhaps? At least so goes the basic plot of William Gibson’s new novel, The Peripheral.

“It’s new . It’s quiet. Lev looks for new things, things his family might invest in. He thinks this one may be out of Shanghai. Something to do with quantum tunneling.”
“How far back can they go?” “Twenty twenty-three, earliest. He thinks something changed, then; reached a certain level of complexity. Something nobody there had any reason to notice.” “Remind me of it later.”…

In Finland last month I gave a presentation on Law, violence and b/ordering, in which I began by making two preliminary points about border crossings and (para)military violence: trans-border incursions and transgressions have been facilitated by (i) new stealth technologies deployed by state actors and (ii) the rise of new non-state and para-state actors. Here are the relevant slides:

I derived the map showing the advance of IS(IS)/ISIL from the Institute for the Study of War; say what you like about their politics (this is the Kagans we are talking about), their maps and summaries are extremely helpful.

Now Public Intelligence has just published a series of (unclassified) maps of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan produced by the Humanitarian Information Unit of the US State Department called Conflicts Without Borders:

‘Conflicts Without Borders refers to a conflict in one country that draws in other governments and non-state actors…